That's quite sad news, I'm very bullish on the great script restoration, it's the most promising scaling solution to bitcoin imo.
I can't help with coding, but I can help get some funding for it. If you vouche for a contributor, I'll hussle to get him paid.
What are some of the use cases and scripts that will be possible with the additional opcodes?
Multiplying numbers, haha, groundbreaking I know!
That gets us zero knowledge verifiers though.
Haha, okay. Any more background on that use, who's working on it, discussing it, and documenting?
Seems like there is quite a bit that could be possible with more complete set of opcodes, as initially drafted in early implementations. Also sounds like some of what could be possible also needs more research.
Problems with DoS (the reason they were dropped) is also a solvable problem as far as I am concerned, given enough review and testing. I can see why they were initially dropped.
The point of scalable self-custody sounds very important.
There's a big list of second layers that currently use bitVM to hack an emulated zk verifier onchain:
